Lifehacker hard drive reliability

Hard drives designed for businesses are generally considered more reliable than consumer drives—after all, they're used in company servers and important storage arrays. Don't let the "enterprise" label fool you, though. Data from Backblaze suggests consumer hard drives might be more reliable.

In addition to recording failure rates of thousands of consumer grade hard drives, the online backup company has also been keeping tabs on the enterprise-class drives used in its servers. (The consumer grade drives store customers' backup data, while the servers from Dell and EMC store Backblaze records that run the business.) Long story short, they found that the failure rate of the enterprise drives is higher than the consumer ones—4.6% annual failure rate versus 4.2%.

The consumer drives are up and running all the time, but the enterprise drives are used more heavily and not subject to the vibration that the consumer drives are. Backblaze doesn't have data on failure rates for the enterprise drives beyond two years, but right now, the company concludes that enterprise drives aren't worth the extra cost if you're going for reliability alone:

Enterprise drives do have one advantage: longer warranties. That's a benefit only if the higher price you pay for the longer warranty is less that what you expect to spend on replacing the drive.

This leads to an obvious conclusion: If you're OK with buying the replacements yourself after the warranty is up, then buy the cheaper consumer drives.

Source: lifehacker.com

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